Chemistry for Beginners

PART I

The ancient Greeks, when they looked about them on the world in which they lived, came to the definite conclusion that everything is in a constant state of flux, or change. Things animate and inanimate gradually disintegrated and tended either to disappear (apparently) or to change into other forms of matter. With their true æsthetic sense, they felt it necessary that there should be some one permanent thing in the world, underlying all the changes which they saw going on about them, and many of their early speculations were devoted to the nature and constitution of this one “permanent thing.” Thales, of Myletus, who flourished about 585 B. C., and who was, perhaps, the first great philosopher and physicist, contended that the essential principle of things,--the substance, or stuff, of all things,--must be water. He held the view that, by condensation and rarefaction of water all things rise, and he actually attempted an evolutionary account of the Genesis of Man, Plants and Animals, with this idea as a basis for his thought.

Anaximenes said that air, or ether, must be the substance of things. Heraclitus regarded fire as the most primary element in the universe,--from which all else arises. Anaximander said that the “unlimited”--a sort of boundless, animated mass--is the ultimate substance. Plato, as we know, contended that the permanent reality of things was not anything material at all, but was mind, or spirit. Empedocles, (495–435 B. C.) advanced the theory that there are four elements--Earth, Air, Fire and Water. Anaxagoras contended that nothing changed of itself, but that it is caused or made to change, and that that which produces these changes is the permanent reality. This he believed to be a sort of mind or universal intelligence (Nous), but he regarded this mind as strictly impersonal, as well as immaterial, and did not attempt to answer the difficulty as to how mind can affect matter in any detailed manner.

It was only natural that, prior to the discovery of the laws of the indestructibility of matter and energy, that this sense of “change” should have struck these early thinkers very forcibly, since they had no means of ascertaining that, when matter disappears from our sight, it is not actually destroyed. We now know that, when we burn a candle, the candle disappears, but that the elements composing the candle are merely changed into invisible gaseous compounds, which are no longer visible to the human eye. Lacking delicate instruments of precision, the ancients could not know this; to them, the matter of the candle would have disappeared. Hence, it was only natural that they should seek the ultimate reality behind these changes, and speculate as to its origin and nature.

ALCHEMY

The modern science of chemistry is relatively new. It gradually emerged from alchemy, which practically constituted the chemistry of the middle ages. The objects of alchemy were various: (1) the transmutation of the base metals into gold, by means of the so-called “Philosopher’s Stone”; (2) The fixation of Mercury; (3) The discovery of the elixir of Life, etc. These were the purely chemical aspects of alchemy, but we now know that the alchemists had much more than this in mind, in their experimental work, and that they hinted at their true meaning in many of their veiled writings. Many of the higher types of alchemists were also mystics, and when they wrote in chemical symbols, they really concealed their inner meaning; they referred, very largely, to the inner spirit of man, and the methods by which this could be changed or transformed into some higher spiritual being. (See “Alchemy Ancient and Modern,” by H. Stanley Redgrove; “Alchemy, Its Scope and Romance,” by the Rev. J. E. Mercer, etc.) Mr. Foster Damon has lately published a series of articles in which he has brought forward a mass of evidence tending to prove that the alchemists were also deep students of psychic phenomena, and that their experiments relative to the “First Matter” were really experiments in so-called “Materialization!” He has published his findings in a series of articles in the “Occult Review.”

MODERN CHEMISTRY

Modern chemistry may be said to begin with Robert Boyle (1626–1691). He defined an element as a substance which could not be decomposed, but which could enter into combination with other elements, giving compounds capable of decomposition into these original elements. The number of elements which were thought to exist varied greatly,--some contending that they were but few in number, others that they were numerous. It must be remembered that all this was before the time of Dalton, and that the atomic theory had not yet been advanced as a scientific hypothesis, since the days of the ancient Greeks, when Democritus and Epicurus had defended this view. The swing of science, at that time was, therefore, toward the materialism of those older writers, and the atomic theories which they had then proposed.

Chemistry is that branch of science which investigates the nature and properties of matter in all its forms. It is, perhaps, the most materialistic of all the sciences, since it deals essentially with matter. Physics deals with forces or energies, or the energies manifested by and through matter, but the two are more or less inter-related--especially of late years, as we shall see. Chemistry is essentially an experimental science, and practically everything which has been learned about it has been acquired by means of laboratory experimentation. But here as elsewhere theories have woven together the mass of separate facts, and of them made a consistent and philosophical science.

There are two main divisions of chemistry--inorganic and organic; that is to say, the chemistry of “dead” matter, and the chemistry of “living” or organic substances. Chemical experiments may be for the purpose of analysis--discovering the constituents of a given substance; synthesis, in which a compound substance is “created” from several simpler ones; or purely experimental, in which certain tests are made, and the results or reäctions noted.

MEDIAEVAL CHEMISTRY

As before stated, Chemistry is more or less the direct child of Alchemy; but before the modern, scientific period of chemical research had been reached, two transitional stages were first of all passed through. These were (1) The so-called “Iatro-Chemical” period--the period of medical mysticism; and (2) the “phlogistic” period. A few words will be necessary to explain each of these terms, and the period of chemical development which they covered.

As may be inferred from the name, the iatro-chemical period was one in which attempts were made to combine chemistry and medicine, and make the former serve the latter. All kinds of weird concoctions were tried, and attempts were made to explain, on chemical principles, all the changes and reactions occurring in the body--an attempt which was necessarily futile for the chemistry of that day. However, many important results were achieved, as the consequence of experimentation, and chemical science was on the whole enriched, even though the workers of that day were inspired by totally erroneous views.

The Phlogistic Period takes its name from a hypothetical substance denominated “phlogiston.” This was supposed to be an invisible principle or entity, constituting the basis of Fire, and corresponds to the “pure fire” of Zoroaster. The Phlogiston theory was propounded and championed by Stahl, and it was defined by him as follows:

“Phlogiston is ... a very subtle matter, capable of penetrating the most dense substances; it neither burns, nor glows, nor is visible; it is agitated by an igneous motion, and it is capable of communicating its motion to material particles apt to receive it. The particles when indued with this rapid motion constitute visible fire....”

This conception dominated the whole scientific world for many years. The experimental work undertaken by Scheele and Priestly, however, finally enabled Lavoisier to discover the true nature of “fire”--combustion. In a famous “Memoir,” published in 1783, entitled “Reflections Concerning Phlogiston,” he showed that all the observed phenomena could be accounted for without the presence of any hypothetical phlogiston; in fact, as he himself says, they “can be better explained without phlogiston than by means of it.” His discovery of oxygen, in the atmosphere, was a fundamentally important step in modern chemical science. Hitherto, the air was thought to be a single gas, or a mixture of various gases; but oxygen was unknown as its most important constituent. Lavoisier’s discovery finally disposed of the phlogiston idea, and ushered in the new era of scientific chemistry.

It may be thought that undue space has been devoted to this theory of Phlogiston; but anyone reading the history of Chemistry will realize the extent to which this idea completely dominated the minds of men at that time, and how all chemical researches were perverted by it. The discovery of the true nature of combustion was one of the fundamental turning-points in the history of scientific thought.

The material world in which we live is very evidently composed of a variety of substances. At least some of these were soon seen to exist in at least three different states--solid, liquid and gaseous. These seemed to differ radically from one another; ice, water and steam are as different as one can imagine; and yet, somehow, they were the same thing after all; for ice melts and becomes water, and water, when heated, becomes steam. On the contrary, steam cools and becomes water again, and when it is sufficiently cold, will again form ice. There must be some fundamental Thing, therefore, of which water is composed. What is this Thing? How many such Things are there in the world? Are there a limitless number, or only a few? If a certain, limited number, how many? And how discover them? These were questions which naturally occupied the minds of men throughout the ages. No answer was found, however, and it remained for John Dalton to discover and formulate the Law which enabled men to obtain their first glimpse of the nature of the ultimate constitution of matter.

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